Hands up, who’s got a smartphone? All 2.71 billion of you. Now keep your hands up if you know a) how it was made, b) how it gets disposed of when you’re on to your next one, and c) what it does to your health and freedom in the meantime. 

That probably only five people still have their hand up is by no means an accident; it’s good for business. Because if you had known you probably wouldn’t have got one in the first place. You certainly wouldn’t want to keep the one you have — although, for reasons we’ll get into, it may be too late for you now.

From utterly horrifying to utterly, utterly, disgustingly horrifying, here are 10 things Big Tech would rather keep a secret.

10. Smartphones are designed to fail

Although smartphones could easily last more than three years, most people dispose of them sooner. Why? It’s not, as it should be, for all the reasons here, but because of planned obsolescence. This is a business strategy comprising various techniques to ensure there’s always demand for new phones. 

These techniques include high repair costs (e.g. for screens) versus buying a new device, the scarcity of genuine parts, short warranties, and clever marketing. All of these approaches are coercive more than anything. But planned obsolescence more specifically refers to failures built into the software or hardware of your (their) device. Apple, for example, has been accused of deliberately slowing down iPhones with an “update”. They deny it, of course, but have nevertheless agreed to settle with its customers (products) for $25 per device.

9. Your smartphone diminishes your quality of life

There are two ways to use a smartphone — consciously (what researchers call the ‘Aware’ mode) and unconsciously (the ‘Unaware’ mode). Most of us will immediately recognize the difference as that between us using the technology and the technology using us. Unsurprisingly, high levels of smartphone use in the Unaware mode have been linked to diminished quality of life (measured in positive feeling, competence, and functioning).

What’s worrying about this is that smartphones aren’t a habit afflicting just a few, like smoking. It’s total. Hence the concerns for generations raised in a world where smartphones have always existed. ‘Generation Z’, for example, or ‘iGen’, differs starkly from its predecessors, the ‘Millennials’ — more starkly than Millennials from ‘Generation X’ and than any other generation has from its own predecessor.

One key difference is in how they spend their time. Since the release of the iPhone in 2007, teenagers are reportedly spending less time hanging out with friends, dating, having sex, or even sleeping — and more time feeling lonely. Instead of meeting up, teenagers tend to inhabit virtual spaces online — apps and websites. And it’s not making them happy. According to the Monitoring the Future survey, those who spend more time looking at their smartphones, and social media, are far more likely to be unhappy with their lives.

8. Smartphone apps are intentionally addictive

How many times a day do you check your smartphone? In typical addict fashion, even heavy users probably underestimate it; the average for Americans is 262 times per day. What is our fascination with these little black mirrors?

Well the truth is it’s not our fault, or even our choice. Smartphones are addictive by design. According to app developer Peter Mezyk, “the success of an app is often measured by the extent to which it introduces a new habit.” Why? Because attention pays. The more time our focus languishes on social media and other apps, the more ad revenue their creators rake in. Your mind is the product, not the customer. Former employees of Apple, Google, Facebook, and others have placed this beyond any doubt. 

In fact, there’s now an industry standard for encouraging addiction. It’s based on a model devised by Stanford psychology professor B.J. Fogg, and works by generating a stimulus around negative emotions such as boredom or loneliness. 

7. “Your” smartphone is a surveillance device

Edward Snowden famously risked his life to reveal how closely the US and other governments monitor their citizens. It’s part of the reason why VPNs are, for some of us at least, the new normal. But we still carry the snoops in our pockets. Thanks to virtually untraceable spyware, all governments now have the ability to access our smartphones without our knowledge. And it’s an ability they exploit.

It’s not just America. The Polish government has gathered data from dissenting journalists’ phones for use in smear campaigns against them; the Hungarian government has deployed spyware to monitor NGOs; Greece has used it to cover up corruption; the Spanish have used it to monitor individuals involved with the Catalan independence movement… The list goes on. And it’s hardly surprising. 

What is surprising is the ignorance of smartphone surveillance capabilities even among those most at risk. Protestors, for example, continue to carry their personal tracking devices — allowing police to identify and track them with ease.

6. Checking your smartphone ruins your eyesight and skin

Most smartphone users don’t care about their eyesight; either that or they don’t know the risks. According to the Vision Council, 80% of Americans look at their devices for more than two hours per day — and 59% have digital eye strain. Worryingly, this damage to retinal cells can lead to age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, eye cancer, and growths on the whites of the eyes. Making matters worse is people tend to blink less when looking at screens. You’ve probably felt your eyes drying out and the headaches that result.

If you think you’ve got youth on your side, beware: the opposite is true. Children’s eyes actually absorb more blue light, placing them at greater risk of diseases.

But it’s not just the eyes. High levels of artificial light also stress the skin — both indirectly, by upsetting sleep patterns, and directly, by oxidative stress. Studies have revealed that exposure to short-wavelength visible light (such as blue light), even for short periods of time, can generate cell-destabilizing molecules (reactive oxygen species) and consequently the early death of skin cells. The result is accelerated aging and wrinkles. But there is a silver lining: Given the concurrent damage to your eyesight, it may be less visible in selfies.

5. Smartphones cause debilitating mental illness

The most obvious and widespread mental harm associated with smartphone use is the stress of being constantly networked. Users feel compelled to respond to every message they get, when they get it, so as to maintain this connection. Studies show us what we already feel numerous times each day: that notifications activate the sympathetic nervous system, releasing adrenaline that in turn increases the heart rate and muscle tension. It takes 30 minutes for the body to stabilize again, and this is 30 minutes many of us never get. 

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Other chronic problems include sleep disruption, cyberbullying, emotional dysregulation, depression, anxiety, impaired cognitive function, low self-esteem and social avoidance.

We don’t need studies to tell us these things, but surveys of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders between 1991 and 2016 show that adolescents spending less time on electronic communication were happier.

4. Smartphones are physically hurting you

We’ve already mentioned how blue light can be damaging to the eyes and skin. It gets worse. By disrupting your circadian rhythm and diminishing sleep quality, it can also contribute to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The manual labvor involved in using a smartphone (unnatural repetitive hand and neck movements) could also lead to trapeziometacarpal osteoarthritis and neck strain. In fact, the force of strain on the neck is 40 pounds at a 30-degree tilt and 60 pounds at 60 degrees — the equivalent of having a child sitting on the back of your neck every time you look down at your phone.

But it’s not just the blue light; it’s also the exposure to radiofrequency-modulated electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs). Spending just 50 minutes on a cell phone call has been found to increase brain glucose metabolism in the region of the brain closest to the antenna. And while it’s not clear what harms this might cause (including to young people’s developing brains), RF-EMF emissions are linked to cancer, and phone use to increased risk of brain tumors. Even on a day-to-day basis, since RF-EMF frequencies sometimes correspond to those in neuronal tissue, it’s feared they could interfere with cognition. Even tiny interferences could have a butterfly effect. It has also been shown that EMFs can penetrate cells and interact with mitochondrial DNA, ultimately destroying through oxidative stress. At the very least, it could lead to electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

And while it’s easy to forget while looking at your smartphone, we still share this world with other creatures — many of whom have been negatively affected by the spike in EMF radiation. There’s heaps of evidence for harms caused to ants, birds, frogs, bees, rodents, plants, and other wildlife. Bees, for example, when exposed to cell phone EMFs for just 10 minutes per day for ten days, don’t return to their hives. This is because they rely on the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.

3. Smartphones are assembled in sweatshops

Workers’ (and human) rights abuses at FOXCONN in China, where Apple and Sony get their phones made, are relatively well known — and entirely unresolved. Workers are still paid less than they need to get by, even on overtime hours (which are often not paid as a punishment for not meeting quotas). They’re also exposed to toxins without protection and lied to and abused by their managers (who, for example, have promised double pay to ramp up production but only paid standard in the end). If they want to resign, they have to ask permission, and permission is often denied. They are, in other words, slaves. So it’s no wonder suicide is common there.

But it’s not just FOXCONN or Apple or Sony. All smartphones rely on cheap labor. Another example is Samsung’s sweatshops in Vietnam, where among the mostly female workforce miscarriages are a routine and expected occurrence. Most of their time, even while pregnant, is spent standing causing dizziness and fainting. The toxic fumes don’t help, or the haphazard mix of day-shifts and nights. Even “free time” is painful, since factory dormitories intentionally keep mothers separate from their families.

2. Children die mining cobalt for batteries

More than half the world’s cobalt supply, which smartphone manufacturers depend on for the batteries, comes from hand-dug mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Euphemistically known as ‘artisanal mines’ (ASM), these places are hell on earth.

The true extent of the horror isn’t clear because most of it gets covered up. But what we do know paints a chilling picture. Tens of thousands of children as young as seven years old, all on less than $2 per day, work up to 12 hours a day carrying heavy loads, breathing toxic dust, and contracting skin diseases underground. Accidents are common, resulting in loss of limbs and life, with many bodies left buried in the rubble.

And while the big brands claim to be against child labor, the truth is they’d be smaller without it. So it’s no surprise that, according to Amnesty, they’re not even investigating suppliers. After all, since few smartphone users in the developed world really care, there’s very little pressure to do so. The problem is now so entrenched that “ethical” smartphone alternatives like Fairphone find it impossible to separate ASM-supplied cobalt from other sources. 

1. Smartphones are ravaging the planet

Although your smartphone activity might feel relatively carbon neutral — at least between charges from a power outlet — the data centers required to process all the information involved consume masses of energy. Phone towers too. In the US alone, 4G uses 31 million megawatt-hours of electricity per year, which is enough to power 2.6 million households. 5G is expected to use triple this amount. 

Beyond this, there’s the even bigger impact of manufacture and especially mining. Mining (not just for cobalt but for all the materials invovled, including gold and silver) accounts for as much as 95% of your smartphone’s total carbon footprint during its lifetime… which isn’t very long.

Once you’re done with it, it continues to wreak havoc on the planet. Discarded electronics (or ‘e-waste’) reached a mass of 43 million tons in 2016 alone — equivalent to 4,500 Eiffel Towers. But it’s out of sight, out of mind for most Americans. The hellscapes of e-waste dumps are far away in the developing world, in China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries where regulations are lacking.

Average smartphone use has climbed so high that, as Vox reported in December 2020, when major tech companies like Facebook and Google tried to implement services to moderate daily use by their customers, the efforts were unsuccessful. If even the very entities that stand to profit from constant online engagement admit there is a problem, make efforts to correct it, and fail, then it seems likely that the problem isn’t going to at least endure if not exacerbate. So let’s try to get a more solid understanding of the nature of the harm excessive access to the internet through mobile phones is causing us.

We’re not talking about the social or psychological harm of phone addiction. We’re not even talking specifically about disrupted sleep patterns. We’re going to go body part by body part, describing the damage overuse of the mobile device does over time. As the old saying goes, let’s start from the top.

10. Pineal Gland

While the constant access to updates is well-known to have negative effects on a users’ ability to relax and fall asleep, many phones have more direct negative physical effects. The blue light that is the default on a smartphone screen mimics the color temperature of sunlight, and thus it subconsciously tells the pineal gland that the user is in daytime conditions, which blocks the flow of melatonin that induces a sleep state. Even for many people who can get the sleep needed anyway disrupting the chemical flow can induce tiredness during the day.

On the bright side, if you’ll pardon the expression, tests showed that very effective countermeasures exist for those who can’t kick the habit of using their smartphone in bed. An evaluation published by the American Academy of Optometry in March 2020 found that switching a smartphone to night mode for bedtime usage lowered the potency of the effects by about 93%. Additionally, an article on the subject by Cleveland Clinic reported that not using the smartphone as little as 30 minutes before bedtime offset the effects.

9. Temporal Lobes

Temporal lobes are involved in the control of involuntary biological processes, most notably the beating of a heart. Among epileptics, they are the portions of the brain that are malfunctioning during blackouts, chest pains, and other symptoms of a seizure. According to Economic Times, prolonged use of smartphones has been found to aggravate seizures. This is no trivial matter for epileptics, as there is roughly an annual 0.1% chance of becoming victim to Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy, and that’s among those that are otherwise healthy.

Fortunately, according to A. K. Sahani, the senior consultant for the Indian Spinal Injuries Center, keeping phone calls under an hour’s length significantly reduces the deleterious effects. Even for those who need to use the device for that long, using earpieces instead of holding the phone up to the head is a largely effective means of preventing the negative effects to the autonomous systems. For those who are not epileptic and think this is not advice that matters for them, bear in mind that a 2016 study reported by the Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences found evidence that prolonged exposure left mice more vulnerable to seizures, indicated even those who are not diagnosed epileptics can suffer similar damage.

8. Eyes

It turns out evidence indicates that the blue light of smartphone screens doesn’t only negatively affect the pineal gland, as you’ll soon see. Or perhaps as you may not see. In 2018, researchers at the University of Toledo tested exposing cells to the shorter wavelengths of blue light. The results were that those infused with retinal, a chemical released by the eyes, suffered damage that tissue without retinol in it did not. This could be disastrous for photoreceptor cells in the eyes, as damage to those cells is permanent.

The sort of damage it is postulated that smartphone blue light worsens is called macular degeneration. This condition is most prevalent among people above the age of 60. So for our older viewers that are hesitant to begin using a mobile device, Dr. Ajith Karunarathne just gave you a great medical excuse.

7. Ears

No it’s no surprise that pumping loud music directly into your ear canals is at the worst extremely risky for the quality of one’s hearing. However research from the University of Arkansas for Medical Services found that even if the volume is kept low, it can still damage hearing. As Dr. Allison Woodall explained, using a phone for over an hour a day can lessen a listener’s ability to hear sounds between 2,000 and 8,000 hertz (which includes a wide range of human speech) because of the electromagnetic waves emitted by the device rather than the strict sound waves.

As with other entries, there are solutions to those whose lifestyles make it infeasible to just decide to use a smartphone less. Woodall highly recommended the use of the hands free option or speaker phone to get the device away from the ear. Additionally, in 2021 Reuters reported that studies found that wireless bluetooth ear pieces lowered the electromagnetic exposure by as much as 1,000%, and that AirPods were an equally safe solution.

6. Teeth and Jaw

If the thought of a smartphone habit is making you anxious enough to grind your teeth, research by Tel Aviv University has given solid evidence that many if not most heavy smartphone users can relate. Tel Aviv University’s School of Dental Medicine was in an especially good position to test the hypothesis. There are many ultraorthodox Jews in Israel who use more basic cell phones without access to social media platforms, so it was a relatively easy matter to acquire a substantial study group of non-Smartphone users.

A study of 600 participants found that among smartphone users, 45% reported that they suffered from teeth grinding, compared to 14% among the orthodox, a more than 200% higher rate. Additionally, 29% of smartphone users reported that it was severe enough that they felt noticeable jaw pain while among the orthodox it was only 14%. In many cases, the harm was severe enough that joint damage occured in the jaw.

5. Neck

There was a particularly cutting meme in 2016 which portrayed a player of Pokemon Go suffering from a grotesquely elongated neck that a Pokemon rode on. Turns out that was probably more cruelly accurate than the artist intended. As reported by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy in 2014, when smartphone users look down to type out a text message, the forward tilt of their head shifts more strain to the top vertebrae. We’re talking substantially more strain here. A model published by The Guardian went into detail on the effects: Tilting down 15° adds 125% more strain then holding a head level. At 30°, it’s about 233% more. By a 60° tilt it is up by 400%. The degree of pain, numbness, and general dislocation this can lead to has been known to require surgery to correct. A study published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found problems have set in for heavy users as early as adolescence or even in childhood.

Solutions for this have included switching more to old-fashioned audio calls over texting. Of course, we saw in entries such as #7 that holding the phone up to the user’s ear can have some negative effects too. For those who’d rather continue texting, there are a number of exercises that can be used to treat the effects. For example there’s “chest opening,” which involves clasping the hands behind the head and squeezing shoulder blades back for 10 to 20 seconds. There are also multiple yoga stretches that are productive treatments. It could be argued, though, that all this will use up the time that a smartphone user saves by texting. Still, better than pain or surgery.

4. Heart

It’s nothing new that mobile devices are not good for heart health, considering federally funded research into the subject began in 2010. The study surprisingly found that younger members of the control group tended to suffer the most extreme cases of heart arrhythmia, palpitations, flutters, and other conditions. The effects of smartphones have been so pronounced that they’ve been put forward that they have changed both the most common day of the week and the time of day for cardiac arrests.

We do wish to caution that the findings indicate that the effects are from behavioral changes instead of due to the electrical processes of the devices. A 2012 study by Annals of Medical and Health Science Research found that the electromagnetic processes of a smartphone do not significantly affect hearts. However, the US Food and Drug Administration recommends that anyone with a pacemaker keep it at least six inches from their smartphone at all times.

3. Elbow

As if Text Neck weren’t enough, by 2009 “Cell Phone Elbow” had become a commonly used nickname for the discomforts of heavy smartphone use. It was actually a rebranding of Cubital Tunnel Syndrome, which had been recorded in medical journals since at least 1958. How it works, or fails to work depending on how you look at it, is that holding up a smartphone for a prolonged period pinches the ulnar nerve in the forearm and at times moves it out of the proper position and into a place where it can be damaged. It’s similar to carpal tunnel syndrome though much less common before people began propping the arms up on their elbows to watch their smartphone screens at night.

Once again, for those who want to avoid surgical procedure Cubital Tunnel Release, exercises are there to come to the rescue. Popular Science suggests putting arm curls and overhead presses into a workout routine as a preventative measure. User who have already noticed mild pain or numbness should begin to heavily massage their forearm and outer forearm.

2. Wrist

If you were worried that people are becoming so weak that just the effort exerted to hold up a phone is becoming an issue for us, it’s not the act of holding up the phone that’s the problem. It’s swiping the fingers that we should worry about. The unusual ways that fingers move to scroll across sites on smartphones have been linked to conditions such as tendonitis, chronic pain, and even loss of use of the index finger and thumb, a malady nicknamed “trigger finger.” An October 2021 Washington Post article on the subject boosted the phrase “smartphone pinkie” for the impact of excessive phone use on the digits, but fortunately that doesn’t seem to have caught on.

John Hopkins University’s orthopedic surgeon Duc Nguyen’s suggested treatments included often changing position on how the smartphone was held, using handheld devices, or getting a pop socket to distribute the weight more evenly across the fingers. It should be mentioned, though, that Ventura Orthopedics surgeon Josh Gluck told Slate magazine that the fingers are not connected to the ulnar nerve, so looking out for the fingers and wrist doesn’t risk causing  more trouble with Cell Phone Elbow.

1. Sciatic Nerve

And now we have reached the end, both of the list and the rear. See, the sciatic nerve is the longest nerve in the human body, and it runs from the lower spine down to the foot. Placing smartphones in back pants pockets has been determined to put unnatural pressure on the sciatic nerve, like a more direct version of the discomfort heavy smartphone use places on the ulnar nerve.

If you’re wondering why smartphones would cause this problem and not something like, say, a gun belt or a tool belt, well, those actually do as well. In all cases, a simple and effective treatment seems to be moving the problem device to the front. For those who are worried that a front pocket smartphone presents a risk to the sperm, don’t. In 2014 the University of Utah Health Hospitals and Clinics reported that mobile devices had at most an 8% effect on sperm counts, meaning more than enough healthy sperm that avoiding sciatic nerve problems were worth the tradeoff.